1. Field of Invention
This invention relates in general to computer databases, and in particular to locating and generating connections between program objects and data objects distributed throughout a computer network.
2. Related Materials and Definitions
This application is related to the following applications which are hereby incorporated by reference:
UNIVERSAL TAG IDENTIFIER ARCHITECTURE (Application-07/963,885), now U.S. Pat. No. 5,414,841, issued May 9, 1995.
METHOD FOR ASSOCIATION OF HETEROGENEOUS INFORMATION (application Ser. No. 08/262,838), pending.
FACILITY FOR THE STORAGE AND MANAGEMENT OF INFORMATION OBJECTS (NOUMENA SERVER) (application Ser. No. 08/263,146) now U.S. Pat. No. 5,557,790.
FACILITY FOR THE INTELLIGENT RETRIEVAL OF INFORMATION OBJECTS (PERSONA) (application 08/262,834), pending,
FACILITY FOR THE STORAGE AND MANAGEMENT OF CONNECTIONS (CONNECTION SERVER) (application 08/267,022), pending.
METHOD FOR STORING AND RETRIEVING HETEROGENEOUS CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS (application 08/263,379), pending.
The following definitions may be helpful to the understanding of the basic elements of each of the copending application:
Tags: Tags are globally unique identifiers. Tags are sequentially numbered identifiers identifying data objects (i.e. video, text, audio, observations, opinions, etc.)
Phenomena: The logical structure of the system begins with a unit of human perception, the "phenomena". In the universe of a computer system, "Phenomena" is defined as a representation of phenomena which exist in the universe of human experience. Phenomena can be ideas, written matter, video, computer data, etc. Examples include viewing a computer file using a wordprocessor, watching a digital video clip or listening to a digital video segment.
Connections: That which gathers (or links) Phenomena into interrelated collections. Connections are that which lead the user from one Phenomena to another Phenomena. Connections are not simply a road-map from a Phenomena to all other Phenomena. More specifically, Connections represent an observation of related Phenomena made by human or by computer observers.
Connection Attributes: In the logical structure of the system, "Connection Attributes" allow the entire network of Phenomena and Connections to become usable to each user of the system. Connection Attributes store the rationale behind each connection. In fairly generic terms, Connection Attributes describe the Who, What, Where, When and Why of a particular observation.
Noumena: Another concept in the logical structure of the system is "Noumena". Noumena are that which lie beyond the realm of human perception. In computer-based systems, such as the instant invention, they are the computer stored data, examples are "computer files" or "datasets". When these computer files, the Noumena, are observed in their "raw" form, they do not resemble pictures, sounds, nor words. These Noumena resemble a series of bits, bytes, or numbers. These computer files must be manipulated by computer programs, "Phenominated", to become as they appear to the observer. In the present system, Noumena are all of the generic format computer files needed to produce a representation of a Phenomena. This includes the computer data files as well as the computer program files.
Grinding: Grinding is a systematic, computer-based observation of Phenomena. This is typically done with a "narrow view". The programs are usually looking for well defined criteria. When Phenomena are observed by the computer programs, the programs make Connections between the observed Phenomena and other Phenomena known by the programs. In effect, acting as a human observer would when viewing a Phenomena and manually Connection it to other Phenomena.
Persona: to determine the value of information based on each user's subjective preferences.
Capture: During knowledge capture, the human or computer observer Connects two Phenomena and provides the rationale for the Connection by supplying Connection Attributes. The user can also Connect a new Phenomena to previously existing Phenomena.
Retrieve: During knowledge retrieval, an observer navigates from Phenomena to Phenomena via Connections. Knowledge is delivered by experiencing the reconstituted Phenomena. Which knowledge is delivered is controlled by the Connections and the assessment of the Connection Attributes, preferably under the auspices of a Persona.
The present invention supports the overall system of copending application "Method for Association of Heterogeneous Information" It supports the Tag Architecture, Connection Server, Grinding, Noumena Server and the design and infrastructure of the overall system, but is not limited thereto. The term "Phenomena" could be read "object", and the term "Connection" could be read "link" in this disclosure. The distinction between Noumena and Phenomena is made to distinguish between objects as experienced by users (Phenomena) and objects as they are actually stored (Noumena).
The amount of information available in computer databases is expanding rapidly. Additional information is rapidly coming on-line in the form of images, audio and text files. One of the major problems facing the user of a computer system, which has access to large amounts of data, is locating relevant information. The process of locating information is at best very time consuming, as a user requires many computer processor cycles with frequent I/O transmissions. This problem is further exacerbated in modern computer networks where much if not all of relevant data is remote from the user's computer. Worse still though, the user frequently will have access to enormous amounts of data that which he or she is not even aware or of which he or she does not have the capability to search. This data is thus useless to the computer user.
In the prior art, numerous techniques have been implemented to ameliorate the above described deficiency. The most widely used approach has been manual, human initiated search efforts which attempt to correlate data objects to one another. Increasingly however, as volume of accessible information explodes, the human search effort required to manually correlate large amounts of existing information is too expensive, too error prone, and too time consuming.
To cope with the inability of manual, human searching to create the required correlations necessary as the basis for meaningful access to data, recent attempts have been made at automating these search processes. These systems generally employ the generation of hyperlinks in hypermedia using authoring tools. However, these systems suffer several shortcomings which render them inadequate for general purpose use in a computer network housing large quantities of distributed data. First, the volume of potential hyperlinks is large and the manual generation process used by these systems is slow, costly, inefficient and error prone, and thus can only accommodate a small percentage of the available input. Second, these systems are normally static; that is, they are executed once against the data at a single instant in time. Thus, they are unable to respond to updates in the data or to the existence or nonexistence of connections in the data. Third, the manual link generation attempted by these systems is subjective and dependant upon the ability, point of view, and value judgements of the author. The possibility exists that an author might forget the association between some objects over time as memory diminishes, or miss a connection due to boredom, fatigue, distractions, etc. Finally, these systems have no ability to record additional information regarding the connections they create so as to enable a future user to establish why a connection was created.
3. Discussion of Prior Art
HYPERTEXT/HYPERMEDIA
Hypertext, and its multimedia counterpart hypermedia, are methods used by programmers to interconnect references to additional related sources. Hypertext programmers usually store maps of selected links for a particular application within the application itself. These are "closed" systems with no external API's to add links from outside their application. Additional limitations of Hypertext are its static authoring linking process, rapid development of large volumes of data and its inability to crosslink easily to remotely located, and incompatible, sources of information. The most beneficial uses of hypertext/hypermedia are restricted to the workstation level.
Entity-Relationship model
Chen developed the "Entity-Relationship Model". Chen sought to model the relationships universal to a class of entities. His goal was to unify data models for the rigid, predefined, structure provided in database systems. The system fails to provide for a dynamic individualized method to interrelate instances of information, but rather is directed to relating entire classes of information.
Accordingly, the prior art has heretofore failed to address the need for a connection generating process capable of generating large numbers of connections exhaustively, automatically and without the need for manual intervention, in advance of queries for them. Moreover, the prior art has failed provide a connection generating technique which uses multiple passes to search for additional connections whose existence is suspected based on already located connections into research objects for additional connections after those objects are modified. Finally, no method has yet been created in the prior art for storing connections in association with the connected objects to permit future reference to and use of the connections.
4. Objects of the Invention
It is the object of the present invention to create connections between data objects.
It is further an object of the present invention to store said representations of said connections.
It is further an object of the instant invention to create multiple connections.
It is further an object of the present invention to dynamically create said connections.
It is further an object of the invention to create said connections based on human/computer generated search criteria.
It is further an object of the present invention to create said connections exhaustively within a defined scope.
It is further an object of the present invention to make the present connection processes work across networks.
It is further an object of the present invention to perform the connection creation process with as little interruption of normal system processes as possible.
These and other objects will be discussed hereafter as they relate to the drawings, detailed specification and claims.